The First Clash (4 page)

The Athenian hoplites began to pick up the pace, first to a fast walk and then to a trot. The hoplites crushed together, shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield, as each tried to cover as much of his exposed right side behind his neighbor’s shield as possible. Dread and fear melted away now that the army was advancing. Men who had soiled themselves in the line drew strength from the surging men surrounding them. At six hundred yards’ distance, the mass of men began to scream their fierce and nerve-shattering battle cry:
Alleeee!

Hastily, the Persian commanders aligned their troops. Men holding wicker shields went to the front as thousands of archers arrayed themselves behind them. The Persian army showed no panic. They were professional soldiers, victors of a hundred bloody battles. In another moment, the archers would release tens of thousands of deadly bolts into the sky. The spearmen would wait for the arrows to decimate their foe and then advance to slaughter the shattered remnant.

But the Persians had never before faced an army like this one. Athenian hoplites learned the art of war against other hoplites, and their kind of war was not decided by a hail of arrows. It was settled by a collision of wooden shields and deadly iron-tipped spears, wielded by heavily armored men. It was a horrible and terrifying confrontation of pushing, screaming, half-crazed men who gouged, stabbed, and kicked at their opponents until one side could bear the agony no longer and broke. The victors would then launch a murderous pursuit of their defeated foes as the bloodlust propelled them forward.

This was the kind of war charging down on the Persians, and it arrived at almost incomprehensible speed, for at two hundred yards’ distance the Athenian trot became a sprint. Finally, the Persian archers let fly, but to no effect. Never having seen such a rapid advance, they mistimed their shots and most of the arrows flew harmlessly over the charging hoplites. Hastily, the archers reloaded and the shield bearers uneasily began inching backward as ten thousand metal-encased killers were almost upon them.

In a shuddering instant, hoplites smashed into the lightly protected Persians and convulsed their defensive line. Then the killing began.

AN EMPIRE
MADE IN WAR

AN EMPIRE RISES

I
n 547 BC, Croesus, the king of Lydia, had reason to feel satisfied. To his west, where the Greek cities of Ionia dotted the Aegean coastline, a long, costly war had finally ended. These often troublesome Greeks were presently awed by Lydian power and were now paying him annual tribute. To the north, from which the terrifying Scythian horsemen in previous generations had swept down in devastating raids, it had been quiet since his father, Alyattes II, broke the back of Cimmerian power decades before.
¹
To the south, Babylonia remained a strong and dependable ally, a state of affairs that was unlikely to change as long as mighty Babylon felt threatened by the power of the Medes, who occupied the lands east of both Lydia and Babylon.

Since the crushing of the Cimmerians and the demise of the dreaded Assyrian Empire in 613 BC, the Medes had been Lydia’s most serious threat. For five bloody years, during the reign of Alyattes II, Lydia fought an exhausting war to halt Median expansion. Herodotus reports that the war ended only when in the midst of a great battle both sides withdrew in terror as a solar eclipse darkened the field.
²
Whatever the influence of the eclipse, the truth is that the war so exhausted both sides, they willingly allowed Babylon to arbitrate an end to the fighting.

The “Peace of the Eclipse” lasted a generation. In that time, Lydia, the first state to create a standardized coinage, grew rich. So rich, in fact, that even today Croesus’s name is synonymous with vast wealth and riches. However, the Medes, while not as rich as Lydia, had also grown powerful and ever more threatening. So it was with a certain amount of contentment that Croesus had watched the Medes spend the recent years engaged
in a bloody civil war with their cousins the Persians. But by 547, that war had ended and a new Persian-Median king, Cyrus, was solidifying his hold on power. For Croesus this was a troubling development, as the combined power of the Medes and Persians was a dire threat and the youthful Cyrus appeared restless. To forestall a Persian invasion of Lydia, Croesus determined to wage a preemptive war before Cyrus could complete his consolidation of power. But first he had to determine if the gods would bless his enterprise.

According to Herodotus, prior to starting his war with the Persians, Croesus sent envoys to determine the accuracy of each of the major oracles used by the Greeks to foretell the future. After putting each to the test, Croesus decided that the oracle of Delphi was the most accurate. He sent envoys bearing rich gifts to inquire as to the outcome of a war between the Lydians and the Persians. He was much cheered by the Delphic oracle’s promise that if the Lydian army marched against the Persians, a great empire would be destroyed. Unfortunately for Croesus, it did not occur to him to ask another important question: Which great empire would be destroyed? He interpreted the oracle’s words as it best suited his desires and forwarded immense gifts to Delphi, and to several other temples, to secure the full support of the gods.

When the threat Cyrus presented first arose, Croesus also began a period of active diplomacy in an attempt to assemble allies for the coming fight. This resulted in promises of support from Babylonia, Egypt, and even Sparta. If only he had waited for these forces to gather at his capital, the Persian state might well have died in infancy. But believing immediate action was necessary and buoyed by Delphi’s promise of success, Croesus determined to strike out with only his own forces on hand. Beyond the promises of Delphi, Croesus’s confidence rested on the fact that Lydia possessed what was probably the most formidable army in the Near East. It consisted of heavy armored infantry (much of it from the Greek cities along the Aegean) and a formidable host of local levies. However, the mainstay of the Lydian army was its elite heavy cavalry, universally feared for its expert use of lances from horseback.

With the gods propitiated by numerous gifts of gold, the Lydian army launched itself against King Cyrus. In 547 BC, the Lydians marched into Cappadocia, which had been under Median lordship since Assyria’s collapse. After crossing the Halys River, which had been set as the Median-Lydian boundary by the Peace of the Eclipse, Croesus captured the supposedly strongly fortified city of Pteria and devastated the surrounding
country, while waiting to see how Cyrus would react to the provocation. He did not have long to wait. Cyrus, apparently forewarned of the attack, was ready to move immediately after receiving information as to the direction of the Lydian offensive. Moving rapidly from his new capital at Ecbatana, Cyrus gathered further recruits along his line of march, and in what must have been a matter of a couple of weeks, the Persians pitched their camp within striking distance of the Lydian army. Herodotus indicates that the battle that took place was fierce and that many fell on both sides. However, when the fighting ended, at the onset of darkness, there was still no victor. Croesus, who must have been shocked by the speed and strength of Cyrus’s response, blamed his lack of success on the Persians’ greater numbers and determined to fall back on his capital, Sardis, and await the arrival of his allies.

If his army was still in good condition and he had the city of Pteria as a base, and presumably had access to Sinope on the Black Sea, then there was no reason Croesus could not have wintered his army in Cappadocia and awaited his allies. Therefore it is likely that his army, though not vanquished, received a severe battering. Furthermore, his previous policy of ruining the surrounding country had probably left the countryside denuded of supplies. Croesus was now paying for his policy of systematic devastation, which had greatly shortened the time he could linger in Cappadocia; even under the best of circumstances, an army could remain stationary only a short time before it consumed all of the area’s available resources. After failing to win a decisive victory against the Persians, he did not have the choice of staying. Circumstances compelled him to retreat or starve. Still worse lay ahead of him, for Croesus had neglected to stock his capital at Sardis with sufficient provisions to sustain his army through the winter. So upon his arrival at the capital, he was forced to disband all of his army, except for his elite cavalry, and ordered it to reassemble in the spring. At the same time, he sent envoys to Egypt, Babylonia, and Sparta and requested them to bring their armies to Sardis in three months, whereupon their combined might would see Cyrus off.

Cyrus was now left in an unenviable position. The same reason that had compelled Croesus to abandon Cappadocia was now acting on him: A devastated country would not supply his army through the winter. In such circumstances, all precedent called for Cyrus to fall back to Ecbatana, where he could refurbish his army for the next season’s campaign. Realizing that his enemies would gather in vast numbers against him in the spring, Cyrus knew that the prudent course only delayed his doom. Therefore
he launched his army into an unheard-of winner-take-all winter campaign and followed Croesus’s retreating army into Lydia.

Surprised at his foe’s audacity, Croesus weighed his options. Most of his army had left for their homes, and it would be months before any of his allies would appear to assist him. Still, the walls of Sardis were considered impregnable, and most leaders would have considered holing up inside of them until the winter frost decimated the Persian army or until his allies would eventually come to the rescue. Instead, Croesus opted to give battle with the much-reduced forces available to him. Historians have often commented on the folly of his choice, but under the circumstances it was probably the best available. While it is true the Sardis region had not been devastated like Cappadocia, it still could not have had much food left on hand. It had been the mustering point for the Lydian invasion, and as such the Lydian army would have consumed much of the reserve food stores before marching into Cappadocia. Furthermore, the army would have packed much of what was left on wagons and mules to supplement whatever it collected on the march. By early winter, the reserve food stores must have been very low, if they existed at all. Given these circumstances, the idea of a siege of many months must have filled Croesus’s head with visions of famine. As Croesus had not taken the precaution of restocking his magazines within the city, what food stores did exist were probably still stored in the countryside, left for Cyrus to use. As long as Cyrus was not averse to seeing the rural population starve (and it is a safe guess that he would find this acceptable), then his food situation was probably markedly better than what Croesus faced in the city, where he had to feed both his own population and his army. Moreover, as is frequently the case, military commanders tend to magnify their own difficulties while discounting those faced by their opponents. In the final analysis, Croesus probably saw no option except to risk all on a final decisive battle. If he lost, he could still in the last resort retreat behind the protection of Sardis’s walls.

Despite dismissing the bulk of his army, Croesus still possessed the Lydian cavalry, a formidable force, while the plains in front of Sardis afforded perfect terrain for their operations. For Cyrus’s part, he had to consider carefully how to engage such a dangerous foe. Taking the advice of Harpagos, his most trusted general, Cyrus had the baggage camels unloaded and placed at the front of his lines to act as cavalry. As the Lydians did not use camels in their operations, Cyrus hoped that the sight and foul odors of these strange beasts would panic the Lydian horses.

This is precisely what happened. Unable to control their horses, the Lydian cavalrymen dismounted and prepared to stand and fight as infantry against the Persian assault. It was a doomed struggle. Stripped of their mobility and lacking heavy armor, the Lydians were easy prey for the Persians’ massed archers, who always made up the bulk of the Persian infantry forces. Once the archers had done their work, Cyrus unleashed his own cavalry into the disordered Lydian masses. Although there was some fierce fighting at points, the Lydians were soon routed and the survivors streamed back into the city.